October 23, 2013

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Computer scientists from Purdue University led the organization of the 2013 Splash Conference, and helped bring the top software development conference to Indianapolis.

Purdue's Antony Hosking and Patrick Eugster are co-chairs of this year's conference, which focuses on solving problems faced by the software industry, including ways to improve tools the average person uses daily like smartphones, Facebook and Google. The conference will run from Oct. 26-31 at the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis.

"This is the first time this important conference has been held in our area and is easily accessible to students in Indiana and the Midwest," said Hosking, an associate professor of computer science. “There are already more than 30 Purdue undergraduate students signed up to go for whom travel to past locations would have been prohibitively expensive. We really want to encourage students to take advantage of this opportunity to learn from giants in the field and to network with other students and industry representatives."

Attendees come from both industry and academia, and many participants are highly distinguished innovators and educators, he said.

Purdue students can attend the conference for free on Tuesday (Oct. 29) and the university is providing bus transportation from the West Lafayette campus to and from the conference for any students within the area. Students interested in riding the bus should contact Pat Morgan at pam@cs.purdue.edu.

New to the conference this year is a speaker series featuring well-known industry figures discussing what it is like to work in the industry and what students need to do to achieve their goals, Hosking said.

The conference also has broadened its education series, "Splash-E," and will feature a discussion of ways to engage students and implement the new "curriculum 13," a national computer science curriculum established by the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, and IEEE; and a panel discussion of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

In addition to Hosking and Eugster, others from Purdue participating in the conference are professors Suresh Jagannathan, Jan Vitek and Xiangyu Zhang; graduate students Tao Bao and Gregor Richards; and affiliate Tomas Kalibera.

The Splash Conference is an ACM special interest group on programming languages, or SIGPLAN, conference dedicated to the art and science of software development. Its first official instance was in 2010. SPLASH has its roots in OOPSLA, a long-standing research conference in Object-Oriented Programming.